From Deborah Nelson and Himanshu Ojha

The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 – a ratio of 54 to 1.

…Two decades of record federal spending and expanding regulation have fostered a growing upper class of federal contractors, lobbyists and lawyers in the District of Columbia area. The federal government funneled $83.5 billion their way in defense and other work in 2010 – an increase of more than 300 percent since 1989, even after adjusting for inflation. Private industry poured more than $3 billion into lobbying to influence the government, nearly double what it spent a decade ago.

…The ranks of Washington-area workers with incomes above $100,000 rose to 22 percent of the workforce, up from 14 percent in 1990, adjusted for inflation, a Reuters analysis of Census data found.

…Today there are 320,000 federal jobs in the Washington area. Within the District of Columbia, 55 percent pay $100,000 or more.

Nearly 13,000 lobbyists registered with the government last year and reported $3.3 billion in fees, or about $260,000 per lobbyist. That’s 22 percent more lobbyists and 37 percent more inflation-adjusted revenue per lobbyist than in 1998, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Read the entire article, which is well researched and provides food for thought.

On a loosely related note, Richard Green writes

we should pay to society our fair share of what we get from society. But the implication of this is not necessarily that everyone should sacrifice in order to put us all on a sustainable fiscal path.

The Reuters piece may tell us something about who it is that “gets from society” and hence deserves to give something back.